Sunday, February 28, 2010

OMG, NO Wordle!!! Don't Panic.

Knowing how popular Wordle is in the community, and in view of the current "crisis" which may or may not be resolved quickly, I thought I should pull together some alternatives to share with you. They are presented in no particular order. Some are very good and offer more features than Wordle. Some are quite simple and easy to use.

I have used the text of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech with each tool to compare the output. I mostly used default setting where available.

Tagul clouds are designed to be used on blogs, web pages or any kind of site as a replacement for ordinary tag clouds. Each tag in Tagul cloud is linked with an URL and is “clickable” that enables visitors to use it for navigation. Tagul has some features that Wordle doesn’t, like custom shapes selection and multiple font usage in one cloud.

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

WordItOut is a word cloud generator that gives you some control with custom settings. Create word clouds from sentences, whole documents, web addresses or tables. Decide how to filter that text, which words to display or remove, and tweak their importance with ease. Design your word cloud as you like, find that perfect layout, choose your own colours and sizes, or let WordItOut find a random look. You can embed the word cloud on your website in any size you like.

ABCya is very simple and yields Wordle-like results. (Note: Doesn't seem to work smoothly in Firefox 3)

Image Chefseems to work only on very short phrases. It wouldn't process the text from the sample I used. Still, it may serve your needs.

VocabGrabber analyzes any text, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action.

WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts. Cut and paste any text into WordSift. The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but WordSift adds the ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. Other functions are also integrated, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships and Google® searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.

The Tag Cloud tool generates the cloud by removing punctuation, calculating term frequencies, and selecting the font sizes to display. The terms are presented alphabetically in a paragraph-style display. The tool provides options for grouping similar terms and for ignoring common words. You can also control the font colors and the number of terms to display.

These last two entries generate code to embed in your site, but as you can see, I did NOT have success using the generated code from either.

Tag Cloud Generator creates animated tag clouds in html and flash online with just a few steps. (Note: Input must be a URL, text cannot be pasted.)

All comments to this blog are reviewed before being published. The chances of you getting a comment including ridiculously obvious "hidden" hyperlinks to porn sites or other spam published is virtually zero. So, save your time as well as mine, and take your tawdry business elsewhere.

'Bout this Blog

This blog is authored and maintained by Thomas Boito.

All blog content other than comments is the responsibility of the author. Any and all opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and should not be construed as representing those of of any other person or organization.